No one could accuse the attractive, personable Sandra Bullock of using her star power to sponsor works of ambition or originality and her latest production is no exception. In The Proposal, she plays ruthless, friendless workaholic Margaret, senior editor at a New York publishing house, who terrorises her subordinates, fires colleagues at will and thinks that getting an author on to The Oprah Winfrey Show is more important than winning the Nobel Prize.

Unfortunately for her, she's a Canadian citizen and as a result of neglecting to complete some naturalisation forms, she's threatened with deportation across the 49th parallel. But thinking quick, she tells her bosses that she's engaged to her handsome underling Andrew (Ryan Reynolds) and will thus be available for automatic citizenship. She blackmails him into going along with this and he responds by counter-blackmail that secures promotion and the publication of his first novel.

The immigration people get suspicious after receiving information from an editor Margaret has just fired. Threats of jail for Andrew and permanent banishment for Margaret ensue and she's forced to sustain the fiction when accompanying him to a reunion with his loving and surprisingly rich family in the remote Alaskan city of Sitka. So remote in fact that a second unit went there for beautiful establishing shots of the mountains and rugged coastline and the rest was shot in the more accessible Rockport, Massachusetts, which means no walk-on role for Sarah Palin. As the New York sophisticates keep up their pretence of love in front of the honest, down-home Sitka folk, Margaret thaws out (being orphaned at 16 was apparently what made her cold and ambitious) and true romance develops.

This is familiar territory crudely traversed, and when after 90 minutes director Anne Fletcher and screenwriter Peter Chiarelli decide to abandon comedy and concentrate on serious emotion drenched in sentimentality, the film throws its black box to the critics and plunges to the ground. During the phoney intimacy of their fake courtship, Bullock says to Reynolds: "Pat my ass one more time and I'll cut your balls off in your sleep." This line could have come from the first draft of Lars von Trier's Antichrist.